Aiyen

plants: That depends on the textures you are using. I am going to need screenshots if you want more specific help on that. For now all I can say is try to use other textures. I have verified that they look nice if you use SFO, and I do use vanilla for parts of mine and they look nice as well. Settings: Yes some settings need to be set at runtime, and cannot be altered after you started the game. These include SSAO and reflection. If they are off ingame then they are not in effect, and you must have set it in the wrong ini file. Make sure you do it in the enbseries.ini which should be in your skyrim dir. Not any of the specific weather ini´s which are in the enbseries folder. SMAA: If you know how to install SMAA from other presets then the procedure is exactly the same. Copy in the relevant .dll, and .fx files (also the settings.txt in some cases) and setup the proper proxy name in enblocal.ini and you should be good to go. Glad that you found something you like! Even if you do not use SSAO and reflection etc. then the sunsets etc will remain the same :)

If shift + enter does not work it must mean you have an enblocal.ini file that changes the default key settings. Some presets do that, and since I do not provide one you may have it left over from somewhere else. The blurryness is most likely the egde AA which is also set in enblocal.ini. You can disable it. Also under FIX there is an option to enable or disable the default game blur. Finally you most likely have the Depth of field on which blurs everything not in focus by design! Alternatively you can open the enbseries.ini file in notepad and just set the Depth of field to false there under EFFECTS Hope that helps, otherwise just poke at me some more!

A thing to note here is that the author have decided to make new cubemaps for his textures.. but not assigned new paths in his meshes. Hence his will overwrite the vanilla ones which might make other texture mods that use the same cubemaps look wrong. I made a mention for the author about it so he will hopefully update his meshes.

Here is a link to an interesting project that have come up on Nexus today. Future candidate for STEP.. who knows! But at least it seems like the general idea is something we should keep track of. Always nice with another texture overhaul!

In general for .ini files the sections do matter. In just about all programs I ever worked with anyways. The program will only ever check its own internal list vs. the .ini and then overwrite or write as required. Part of the major annoyance with Bethesda game is that even after this long they have not made it so all values are automatically written to the file, or at least provide an option to just allow it. This leads to a lot of guess work, where it is essentially only people with indepth experience in the engine who really knows what is there. As for your solution then it does not seem like magic. In general reducing LOD and drawing distances will reduce all types of stuttering. The trick is getting the highest LOD with the least amount of issues. This might well be what you are on your way to finding here! That in itself is very interesting I would say. In general it is what I have come to expect of the game... large open world, on an old engine that is not overly optimized for the task. I always find it funny that people think it weird that skyrim cannot compete with other titles when it comes to displaying large open worlds... in fact it is quite a feat that it can even display what it does to begin with considering the age of the engine. All that said then thanks for the effort here and happy gaming n holidays!

For resolution open your skyrimprefs.ini and find the following iSize H= iSize W= and input your resolution. Save the file and voila. As for performance increase, there are many things to do to get a bit more. I would never recommend to disable the SSAO since it does provide so much in terms of visual. You can disable reflection and get a bit more that way, its effects are more subtle overall, and you most likely will not miss it. However since you already have the ini files open then make sure that your shadow resolutions do not exceed 2048, or just set them all to 1024 iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=1024 iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=1024 iShadowMapResolution=1024 In skyrim.ini under GRASS Put in this iMinGrassSize=50 It will lower the grass density and in effect make sure you get a bit more fps there. The higher you go the less grass and vice versa. You can find the sweetspot for you. Other then that, you can disable the Depth of Field effect if you do not care about it and get a bit more there as well. You do this by pressing shift + enter while ingame to get the ENB GUI up. Then on the left you will find a drop down menu where it says EFFECTS, and there Depth of Field. Also this is where you can disable reflection. Hope that helps ya out!

Yeah yet another testing done.... no difference at all with those settings on my system and mod list. The game is just the same for me. The only thing that really does matter is if you use ini settings to force full LOD for all objects, and altering drawing distances. This will have an effect on performance and stability in return. But that should pretty much go without saying. And again thanks to keith for being on top of the technical stuff! Much appreciated!

The reason for the "do not mess with the ini´s approch" is quite simply that in 9/10 cases people mess things up. The main issue with ini tweaks is that there are not any golden standard that just works for all... except the base values. Just like ENBoost settings depend on the hardware up to the point where manufacture and the quality of the components are concerned.. then so does the ini settings. Hence people will say "but person A says it works wonders for him/her" and use that to defend that their ini tweak should work... when in fact it wont work for their computer. Anyways I digress. Back on topic! Some spots in the game just aint optimized at all. Short of going into the CK and fix those locations one at a time then you are most likely going to have to accept a middle road in terms of settings. I have also tested out the recomendations at that site, but it is my impression that the fella does not in fact run with an ENB on. But I have noticed a few people I know do say it works good. However again I think it depends on the setup and hardware. For me personally I see no real difference either or. Especially the whole "you might get more FPS" I am highly skeptical about. But I guess in the case of a memory bottleneck on computers with less memory it might be a thing. I have managed to get a stable ugrids 7 setup before... but that was with some compromises in the texture department.. but again 2Gb of VRAM will get you far, but not that far! So I would not be surprised if 4Gb of VRAM would allow you to play around with the higher ugrid settings and a decent selection of 2k textures. As for the ipreload and memory allocated settings, then I have never experienced or seen anything to suggest that they where the reason for improvement. In my experience ENBoost and the Shenson memory patch does vastly more for the stability and ability to get ugrids 7 stable then those. However again my system is just one among many, so do feel free to experiment away and report any findings back! For now I decided to put them back into my current list just for the heck of it. I am almost at the point of stress testing it anyways.

In order for me to help I am going to need you to be consistent! That means learn the weather ID´s and use the same one and see what you can reproduce in different locations. Also make sure to take screenshots! :) I cant answer nr 2 due to the above.... nr.1 I can. All color banding is due to exceeding the dynamic range of your settings. You can adjust your tonemapping, or try to get some dithering and/or sharpen into the mix to see what you can fix. However if you mean it with very greyscale gradients then those are impossible to remove entirely, since well.. those are always hard to remove due to the very high contrast between them. Hope that helps.

Unless it changed radically since the last time we looked at it then I doubt it will make it into STEP due to stability reasons.

You try and see what happens ? ;) Or create dummy files if it really bothers you!

Try out all three and decide which you prefer. The visual differences are quite subtle, and which looks best is subjective. Also there are differences on how it looks depending if you use Nvidia or AMD... or so people have said at least. I have not had an AMD card with which to test this postulate yet, but based on the screens I have seen I would still say you need to deliberately go pixel hunting to find noticeable differences. Finally it also depends on what sort of textures you use, and their resolution. A texture with lots of high contrast detail and/or noise will look different from a more smooth and even toned one. The various performance differences are also negligible on most computers, so it should not be that which determine which you use. I normally recommend using the ENB one if you do use that since then you have all of your graphics settings in one spot. In my opinion that make it easier to deal with any potential issues you might have. Also ENB have the extra feature of LOD bias which direct affect how strong the effect is, and it was made based on the AF in ENB, but it can be used just fine with the others as well.

GrantSP you are right there should not be a debate. Keeping overwrite tidy n stuff is imo something you do at the very end of creating a new list, not something you do on the fly, and definitely not something you do when asking for help. Here it is nice to have this feature since it does eliminate certain potential problems. Overwrite is the same as ANY other mod folder.. the only difference is that it have automatic priority over anything else. So as long as you know what is in there and why, you know you wont have to worry about if it appears in the game. If the .esp is correctly made and the textures are there.. it will work! If you start moving stuff about for these testing purposes then you will introduce more potential issues. So that is why I say to people that they should not begin to move the stuff out when asking for help. As for the issue at hand, then that is why it is not working, I do hope you report back that it has now succeed and you can spawn 20 different awesome mammoths at once and see them fly in different colors!

Some SKSE plugins will make a log or ini file that is placed there.. it does not hurt that they are there. Especially the logs will just be recreated when you run certain other things again. As for removing stuff from overwrite that is a separate debate altogether. I say it does not matter as long as you know what is in there and why. But some people like to keep it tidy, but it is not a game breaking requirement. (The only reason the advice to keep it clean is even a thing is because people tend to not understand why things are in there!) For this specific matter anyways.. I have always had my AV textures in there, because then I know it works. Ofc I assumed that you had created an executable in MO and run it though there. If you did not then that would be why, since then it does not access the proper virtual file system.

As far as I can tell then the issue is because of the volumetric fog on the far mountains, and the breath effect of Wet n cold... once you exhale and the effect overlaps, a transparency issue happens and you get flickering in the fog. You can sort it out by lowering the opacity level of the volumetric fog for those specific weathers. It is not the most optimal solution but it helps. At least that was the issue I was having with it anyways. Hope it helps!

Saw this the other day.... currently looking into it

Again it would depend on the specific model or effect you are looking on.... you cannot just say it will be like that for everything. However it cannot hurt to have it. If your sole reason for wanting to remove them is performance or quality etc. then just use DXT1 as the compression and you will have the most optimal solution, with the least amount of potential issues down the line. DDSopt already does a fairly decent job at deciding if the compression should the DXT1 or 5... and for the few cases where I normally disagree with it I just do it via GIMP.

Hmmm try to use SUM and make that create the patch instead. Perhaps that will work. If the files are no moved and no error happen then I am at quite a loss. Never encountered that happening before.

Normal maps alpha = their specular map which depending on the mesh or effect is relevant. If there is no alpha there is no loss in dxt1 correct.

AV have not patched properly until they are moved there and the .esp is created.. it should come with an error message etc if it fails to create it. Can you actually see the packs when inside the program , and manually select deselect which should be a part of it ? Can you create it just by using all the default settings ?

Verify that you got the .esp and the textures in your overwrite folder. If they are not there then the patcher did not do anything. Also before you run the process verify that all the package content is in the path ...\ModOrganizer\mods\Automatic Variants\SkyProc Patchers\Automatic Variants\AV Packages

You already asked this question in the other DDSopt thread... I have provided the basic answer there as well.

1: There is no general rule.. it all depends on what you want to accomplish. I will try to recommend that you study up on compression and their formats if you want to know all the intricate details of it. If you want to simply have the most general answer, then simply convert everything to dxt5 and call it a day. It is the best performance/quality format there is. The only time you would ever want something else is for certain normal maps where you do not want any compression at all. 2 & 3 : How do you know the alpha channel is useless ? ;) Just because you have a fully transparent texture, perhaps the model or effect it is attached to requires an alpha channel to work and behave properly. So as a general rule you will always want an alpha channel. It does not kill all performance to have it, so you might as well leave it if you are uncertain. If you do not want one for just a specific texture, then DDSopt is not the proper program to use. Use GIMP or Photoshop to manually fix individual textures, to your liking. Can you can remove it/them? Well go ahead and try it out then fire up the game and take a look... that is the only sure way to make sure. In general it seems like you expect more of DDSopt then what it is meant for. It is a general purpose batch converting program.. for when you do not want to open up every single individual file in GIMP or photoshop and fix it manually.

Please keep this thread about the mod, not about the drama and what not. If you want to post about all that lovely drama please take it to the banter inn part of the forums.

First and foremost you got to remember that the only reason skyrim can even use more memory in the first place is due to a hack... it is not native support. There is most likely a bottleneck loss in that most of the data is stored in a separate process and then have to be accessed. When you run maya etc. then they have native 64bit support, and dx11 support, and... lots of other optimization algorithms that most likely run way better then an old gamebryo engine based game ever will. Finally there is the whole "its a game deal" The game was designed around the old consoles, and never meant to handle this, hence many areas etc. are in no way optimized. For this reason you can run with 4096 shadow settings fine in some areas.. but in others it will demolish your FPS regardless of your card.. simply due to that area not being optimized properly. As for stuttering and popin... In my experience then we all have a different interpretation of what it is and how bad it is before it is noticeable. I am fairly sure people who say they have no stutters at all have just not looked hard enough or got a higher threshold for when something is a stutter. Even the vanilla game on the most god like machine today will be able to produce stuttering and popin. All open world games suffer from this. You can load the same scene 100 times and perhaps it will only produce a stutter 2 of those 100 times.. but still. In general if you have more memory you will be able to cache more of the game, and hence reduce stuttering to a bare minimum. I do enjoy from that, I have rather bad long initial load times, but once it is done once then every consecutive load is practically instant. Scripts cause stuttering as well. If you do use mods such as enhanced blood, spell on hit effects etc. etc. then they will be able to produce stuttering quite readily while in combat.. combat is one of the most intensive processes the game does, so always treat that scenario differently than just walking about the game with AI toggled off. Speaking of that. When you want to test stuttering then I normally disable all AI and just walk about and run about.. this will test general texture loading performance, and show bottlenecks due to memory rather easily. For combat testing I normally just spawn 10 badguys.. and 10 other guys and let them fight it out. Or just go to solitude and spawn a couple of dragons and let them loose on all the NPC´s. Spell effects, combat effects etc. it is all good fun to both watch and it will show if scripts are causing a bottleneck with the CPU and/or memory.